I was happy with many aspects of our Open House, but the food is where I had most of my issues. After hosting team pasta parties and teacher breakfasts, I thought I had a handle on what to do. But as I began asking others for advice, I realized an Open House is a crap shoot when it comes to food.
I must make a disclaimer... my mother hails from the South and my aunt has married into a restaurant-owning Italian family, so when it comes to food, we subscribe to the motto, "More is better."
We also had our Open House run a little longer than typical (from 3 -9) since there were some other conflicts that day (a church event in the evening and two other Open Houses). That was wonderful because more people attended (some kids came early, left for other parties, then returned), but it also made it harder to keep food refilled and fresh. We probably had a little over a 100 guests over the course of the night.
Pasta, Pasta, Pasta
My son's favorite food is pasta, so I was lucky that my aunt brought gallon jars of meat sauce, marinara, and alfredo. Another post suggested buying 10 pounds of pasta for each dish for an Open House, which I did. I got 10 boxes of Penne for the meat sauce and 10 boxes of Campenelle for the alfredo. According to my uncle, it is best to use smaller, thicker noodles rather than the typical fettuccini since it tends to clump together. Next time, I will that in half and only use 10 boxes total (5 of each).
Cooking the Pasta
In two huge pots, we boiled water with at least a tbs. of salt and added several boxes of pasta. We cooked the pasta past the point of crunchiness but before the typical al dente. We definitely tasted the pasta often to get the right consistency.
For the first batched, we strained the pasta and rinsed it in cold to stop cooking. We added plenty of olive oil and put them in plastic containers in the fridge.
For the last batch right before the party, we rinsed the pasta with warm water before putting it in the roaster. We heated the sauces to just a warm temperature and added it to the pasta in roaster.
Throughout the evening, my aunt and my brother's fiance were rock stars and kept refreshing the pasta with more sauce and a little bit of the pre-prepared pasta. We used a lot more of the sauce than the pasta and went through almost all the alfredo by the end of the night.
The roasters were great for keeping the pasta warm but not having it turn to mush or burn. At 9 at night, guests were still eating the pasta and complimenting us on it:)
Too Much Chicken
Every time I turn around, my kids are eating some form of chicken...fingers, planks, nuggets, you name it. Therefore, we decided to go with chicken planks in addition to the pasta. Employees from our local store were not very helpful with giving us an estimate of how much to buy. (They probably heard the panic in our voice and decided we were easy prey.) Again, following our family motto and watching our children eat, we ordered 40 pounds of chicken (about 200 planks), which was probably 3x too much. Next time, i will probably order half of that amount.
We also made our lives easier and ordered 144 bread sticks from Fazoli's. After watching members of the XC team eat 8 at a time, we didn't have that many extras.
Skip the Aluminum Pans!
One of my biggest mistakes was using the large aluminum pans with the burners for the chicken and bread sticks. It was too hard to regulate the heat and items directly over the burners sometimes became over-done. I think the biggest issue wasn't that we couldn't keep good covers over them, like we were able to with the roasters. After a while we simply rotated trays in and out of the oven. In the future, I will borrow roasters, and my life will be much easier.
Cold Items
Because we had food in the house, and it was a cool day; we didn't have to worry about our cold food becoming too warm. We had a couple of garden salads with dressings chilled on the side plus a veggie tray.
Since we previously had temps. in the 90s, my mom was worried guests wouldn't want hot food, so she ordered three sandwich trays and had cold bow-tie pasta salad. Again, it was one sandwich tray too many.
One of the biggest surprises was the fruit trays. Usually I can't give it away at team dinners, but we easily went through 3 mini-watermelons and 3 cantaloupes and ran out of a Costco container of strawberries within the first couple of hours.
Sweet Endings - Get half of everything!
As I mentioned in a previous post, I found my cupcake inspiration from a Pinterest post. I ordered 5 dozen cupcakes and two bags of each chocolate candy. I also got a full-size cookies & cream cake from a local baker (it was supposed to be the Purdue train, so we somehow got our wires crossed, but it tasted great).
I also bought two trays of lemon bars and two of the gooey bars plus a tray of cookies and brownie bites from Sam's. A neighbor made some Special K bars, which were a big hit.
Everyone loved the all the desserts, but again half of everything would have been adequate.
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